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Beat the Healthcare PPC Wormhole

Digital marketing in the healthcare industry is crucial in a time where 1 out of every 20 google searches are health related, but running a successful pay-per-click (PPC) campaign is challenging. Without advanced techniques, health care companies will waste their money on ad space by failing to get seen.

Digital marketing for hospitals is specifically challenging. Below we have outlined exactly why your hospital may be struggling in the PPC department, and listed a number of tactics to help you beat the PPC healthcare wormhole.

Competition: Because of the above retargeting restrictions, staying visible on search engine result pages (SERPs) is incredibly important, but keywords are highly competitive (and expensive).

Knowledge Graphs: In an effort to provide more correct medical information, and panicked patients, google has implemented knowledge graphs (certified medical information) that takes over the right hand side of SERPs.

All of that considered, there must be a way to effectively use digital marketing for hospitals with PPC.

Contact Information

Is your contact information readily available for other businesses and patients to view? Check, check, and check again! This is critical for your PPC plan. A patient searching for hospital care digitally is most likely in need of services sooner than later. Having your contact information positioned clearly can set you apart from competitors. Be sure to set up call extensions, location extensions and sitelink extensions to your ad. This makes for a larger ad, and is known to contribute to higher rankings on SERPs.

Contact information is the number one way to gain conversions, so place it on every landing page. If it’s hard to find your phone number, and easy to find a competitors, you will most likely lose a potential patient.

Mobile Marketing

Going mobile is imperative. If contact information is a key factor for a PPC strategy, so is going mobile. Contact information involves communication, and if you need fast contact, you have to call. Using your phone to find and contact a hospital makes it simpler. If your hospital is mobile, a potential patient simply needs to click the number that pops up on the Google page to call you.

Be sure you are tracking your Adwords performance by specific devices. Pay close attention to what mobile campaigns are and are not working. Make your bid adjustments accordingly.

Know Yourself

Finally, understand your target audience. Determine what your patients are searching for the most. There are many types of patients to consider for a hospital. Are your patients generally looking for urgent, emergency care? Are they searching hospital options knowing they will be in for a long term stay? Do your patients even know what they are looking for at all?

Step into the patient’s shoes and consider what you would search for if you were them. Think of triggers that grab their attention that you can then incorporate into the text of your PPC ads. Knowing what sets you apart from your competitors helps you create a PPC campaign that stands out

Interested in learning more about using PPC for your hospital’s digital marketing strategies? We specialize in using dedicated PPC campaigns to boost results for hospitals looking to gain an edge in the paid digital space. Contact us today.

Zsolt Bicskey writing for business2community.com recently gave what he thought were the top trends and best practices for using social media by hospitals and healthcare organizations. His main points are provided here with some slight editing.

Incentivizing Social Media

Having media accounts is useless without followers. Few patients have a reason to follow their hospital on Facebook — it’s up to marketers to convince them otherwise. Start by asking patients to like your pages and profiles (put your info on a business card, perhaps?) and even incentivize the process with drawings of gift cards for the gift shop or discounted parking, etc. Or, if you’re really into making a splash in the online community, send patients information via social media about upcoming appointments and health information they may find informative. The same idea applies to emailed newsletters, text message appointment times, and other reminders.

Visualizations

Marketers have found that people react better to bright, attractive imagery rather than boring blocks of Web text. When you’re making posts or publishing blogs on social media, accompany them with multimedia like videos, infographics, and images. People are more likely to halt their newsfeed scrolling if they come across something that pops off the page. Think visual when you start out on your campaign and find pictures and graphs that accurately reflect your information.

Website Linking

Websites can be like secondary storefronts for hospitals and healthcare organizations. In terms of social medical marketing, link to and from your website with your social profiles and keep it stocked full of new, original, and accurate information about your hospital and your service lines. As mentioned, the best marketing campaigns set you up as a professional authority in a field. Writing pamphlets, articles, and blogs can help support this idea — all you have to do is link them through to your website.

Enlisting the Masses

It would be impossible for you, a busy healthcare marketer, to do all of this on your own. Instead, enlist help from your staff and other experts. Did you get new technology? Ask a doctor or nurse to write up a few hundred words that you then publish on your website. Don’t be afraid to try new things, either; sometimes the most successful strategies are the ones no one has ever tried before.

Going Forward

The most important thing to do is to keep at it. Don’t give up if you don’t have every Facebook follower in town; focus instead on the long-term goal of creating an online brand and presence. Healthcare is a difficult, competitive field on the Internet. It is your job, and you should employ social healthcare marketing in order to support your organization as a source of valuable healthcare information and to provide patients with information.

Sometimes healthcare marketing cannot only be ineffective but could do more harm than good.

Healthcare marketers work very hard to craft a message and effectively communicate to consumers. And getting it right is an art. We want to influence consumers and affect the choices they make. But sometimes in our efforts we can do more harm than good.

Five deadly sins of marketing are outlined by Jonah Sachs, founder of Free Range Studios and author of Winning the Story Wars and summarized by Minda Zetlin for Inc Magazine. And each is appropriately accompanied with a story. They would be worth noting by healthcare marketers.

1. Vanity

The ancient Greek story of Narcissus illustrates this sin, Sachs says. Narcissus, the handsomest hunter in the land became so entranced with his own reflection in a pool that he either remained immobilized there forever or fell in and drowned, depending on the version of the story.

For modern-day healthcare marketers there may be an even bigger risk: being ignored. “It’s hard to tell a story when you’re the main character and everything else is a background for your character’s greatness,” Sachs says. “You’re going to sound largely irrelevant to audiences who hear 3,500 marketing messages a day.” A better approach, he says, is to create a story where the customer (or someone just like him or her) is the hero.

2. Authority

In the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, by Hans Christian Andersen, the emperor relies on the authority of his tailors who assure him he is clothed in cloth so fine only the wise can see it. Too embarrassed to admit that he sees nothing there, the emperor eventually finds himself nude in front of all his subjects.

The problem with relying on authority, whether subject matter experts or facts and statistics is two-fold, Sachs says. First, experts have been so flamboyantly wrong about so many things (remember the doctors who swore in the 1960s that smoking was safe?) that the public is instinctively mistrustful. Worse, by relying on facts you miss the chance to make a more heartfelt connection with customers. “If you can reach people on emotion and values, that’s a more powerful way of getting them marching toward you,” he says.

3. Insincerity

Remember the story of the wolf in sheep’s clothing, one of Aesop’s fables? A wolf that comes upon a sheepskin, puts it on, and hides within a flock. But the disguise works too well and the shepherd, mistaking the wolf for a sheep, slaughters him for his own dinner.

For modern healthcare marketers, the big risk of insincerity is getting found out or people knowing better. With the internet, Twitterverse, Blogosphere, and so much social media out there, it’s fairly difficult to fool anyone for long. And with so much data now available about hospitals and physicians from independent sources and patient reviews it’s very difficult trying to be something we aren’t. You want to reach out to a new audience but you must deliver on your promise.

4. Puffery

The down side of pretending to be bigger than you are is displayed in this unforgettable line from “The Wizard of Oz”: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

“The idea is that we can speak in the disembodied voice of God and have people listen, rather than finding our unique and human voice,” Sachs says. “Finding that human voice is a step that healthcare marketers so often miss. Consumers particularly want to see the human beings behind the brand.

5. Gimmickry

Sachs illustrates this sin with the tale of King You of Zhou who repeatedly calls out his warriors on a false alarm to coax a laugh out of his hard-to-amuse trophy wife. You can guess the rest: The kingdom actually does come under attack so he lights the distress beacons but the warriors stay home, believing it to be another gag.

There’s nothing wrong with being clever, Sachs says, but trying too hard can backfire–which is why, he says, most Super Bowl ads aren’t very effective at selling their products. It’s great to try to be clever to connect with your audience. But you can run the risk of undermining your message and your brand.

These are not the only mistakes marketers make but one that can be deadly for our brands. Clear, concise, honest massages told in ways that connect to our audiences are always the best approach.

Minda Zetlin is a business technology writer and speaker, co-author of The Geek Gap, and president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors